Two books share versions of the same photographs. 8 1/2 Women is a limited edition artist book bound in a blank red plastic cover, bound in the style of a script. It is a rarer, more secondary book, than 8 Women. It is 8 1/2 Women that I write mostly about: an entire photocopy bootleg of the source material, including photographic contact sheets and multiple croppings, that lie behind the final cut: 8 Women by Collier Schorr. An American photographer, Schorr published both books this year in conjunction with her 303 Gallery exhibition, “8 Women”.

Untitled image from 8 1/2 Women

I am flipping through the pages fast; scanning, trying to recognize someone in 8 1/2 Women. Looking fast, at that musician, at that artist. At a woman from my favorite advertisement. A Robert Mapplethorpe look-alike. A rendering of an actress. Bodies are isolated on pages, and men and women are looking back at the camera. 8 1/2 Women is a lot longer than 8 Women and offers the possibility of being rapidly consumed – one page catches my eye and I stop. It is a photograph that is itself a frozen-motion embodiment of flipping: of feet cascading back into the air, of a person falling away from the camera. A girl, a boy, a person upside-down.

Untitled image from 8 1/2 Women

We are seeing the same thing over and over, at close range: a torso. There is no head attached to the torso. It is a photocopied stomach and chest in 8 1/2 Women. There are three images of this torso: the first version is a black and white photocopy of a color photograph. It shows a torso wearing a nipple ring. And in the second photocopy, a solarized torso displays a neck tattoo, negative and positive values inverted. The last picture has the most contrast. Heavy grain of the copier turns scattered freckles the darkest, this photocopy the grainiest and showing only a hint of the neck tattoo. It is this tattoo that connects the torso to a real person, its language and handwriting, the swoop of the last letter: famous, Freja Beha Erichsen is one of Collier Schorr’s repeated subjects, and she is notoriously tattooed.

Untitled image in 8 1/2 Women

She is a supposedly difficult model to photograph. She is often more in control than the photographer. Freja Beha Erichsen is aware of the ways “Freja” should not look, what she would not do, how she would not sit, how she would not be, in an advertisement. In both 8 Women and 8 1/2 Women, Collier photographs the model just before or after a Chanel fashion shoot took place. She catches the model slightly out of character, before her characteristic nipple ring is re-inserted, as the ring does not exist in the advertisement photograph. This portrait is a before-and-after shot. This and most of Collier’s portraits are before-and-afters, picturing bodies at odds, as these bodies prepare to become their image, which might or might not be synonymous with becoming themselves. Many look alone on a stage.

Camera Work, 2013, from 8 Women

The girls, women, boys and almost never men, that Collier photographs are for the most part, good-looking. Sometimes they are nude. Some are professionally confirmed as beautiful; they are models. And some look a little bit like Collier. At least six self-portraits exist in 8 1/2 Women, nearing 200 pages. Picture after picture builds a catalogue of repeated subjects. One self-portrait appears in both 8 Women and 8 1/2 Women called “Self-Portrait (Mimic)”. In the photograph, Collier sits in a chair, and a woman stands behind, pulling the creases of Collier’s eyes backward towards her ears. Is she trying to look like a photograph of herself? Like a photograph of someone else? More likely, she is reconciling herself with a stranger. Reconciling with a photograph of a stranger wherein she recognized something of herself.

Self-Portrait (Mimic), 1996, from 8 Women

Untitled image from 8 1/2 Women

We are getting closer and closer and closer. To what? To a person sitting in a chair. No. To a v-neck white short sleeved t-shirt. Not exactly. To the v-neck itself, the stitched white cloth V. Still no. To a freckle, slightly left of and below a nipple, visible through a white v-neck short sleeved t-shirt adorning a person sitting in a chair. Adorning a man or a woman? Undetermined, I am looking at a person in a series of three photographs, each image cropped tighter than the last. The person’s arm rests over the back of the chair. At its most liberal view, the camera crops the head nearly out of the frame, except for an unexpressive mouth. Claustrophobic crops serve to make us closer.

Untitled image from 8 1/2 Women

Without photographs, are there fantasies? I am looking at a collage. Well, mostly a drawing, of Nicole Kidman. When she had short hair. The edge of the drawing contains a snippet of a photograph, a section of skin collaged into the pencil-drawn neck. The photographic snippet might or might not be from a photograph of Kidman’s neck. Maybe the skin is taken from a photograph of someone Collier knows, or maybe cut from a body in a magazine. The occasional drawings that appear in 8 1/2 Women and 8 Women are drawings from photographs, by a photographer, of women initially encountered as photographic images, consumed over and over as photographs, who are more likely to be mistaken on the street for no one, than to be mistaken in a photograph.

Trending: Florida!

Feeling a little tropical, Chicago? WTT? couldn’t be more proud to see our own cracked out home state finally trending somewhere aside from Buzzfeed.

McCraney addressing the “fancy people” at the Palmer House on June 2nd.

The Arts Alliance of Illinois is even feeling the heat, as they honored award-winning American playwright and McArthur Genius AND Miami native, Tarell Alvin McCraney, at their Voices of a Creative State 2014 luncheon on June 2nd. McCraney speech was (as you might expect from a New World School of the Arts grad) completely captivating, inspiring, and a formidable act for Gov. Quinn to follow. Not to mention he looks like $625,000 in that suit. If you hear me clap once.

The program image for the luncheon featured an image of McArney sporting the Miami area code “305” shaved into the side of his head. BOSS!

Had to sneak a photo in with the man of the afternoon.

Abraham Richie’s lively Roundtable conversation on #ArtinChi at Western Exhibitions in the West Loop. Peep the internets for posts from the event.

This past weekend Miami art non-profit Locust Projects brought their popular Roundtable Series and it’s moderator and creator, the lovely Amanda Sanfilippo, to Chicago for progressive conversations hosted by stakeholders in Chiacgo’s cultural scene. The Locust Roundtables were a part of EXPO Chicago’s /Dialogues program, in conjunction with the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design Conference at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

SPOTTED: Sanfilippo (right) & WTT? informant Alexis Bassett (left) at the Starwalker gala on Saturday night. We assume if you’re reading this you’ve probably seen enough images from the evening (or better yet, you were there!) so we’ll spare you any more shots.

Rapid Pulse continues tomorrow night with a performance by the much loved Mikey McParlane, who will be performing with Floridian transplant, filmmaker & musician, Jimmy Schaus (the performance will also include the hottest jogger in LS, Caleb Yono).

We spotted this sneak peek of McParlane’s rehearsal with Schaus last night on the artist’s instagram account.

And here’s a picture of Rick Ross just because.

Header image features a window installation by Heidi Norton in her exhibition Prismatic Nature, now on view at the Elmhurst Art Museum through August 24th. Not to be missed!

The Weatherman Report

Starving Artist is Anything But

CAC Partners with Chefs, “Mixologists” for Benefit

No one will go hungry at the CAC’s Starving Artist benefit June 21, 2014 to be held at their West Loop gallery space. Based on last year’s event, it appears that no one will go thirsty either. Tired of waiting in long lines for booze at benefit events? We counted at least three inventive alcoholic beverages from last year, including a popsicle made of Hennessey and that classic cocktail of old, jello shots. Enterprising gallerist Andrew Rafacz even managed to make an installation of his own by turning a ping pong table into a game of beer pong in 2013.

Photos or it didn’t happen! Andrew Rafacz, gallerist and professional beer pong athlete.

The event will feature local artists Diana Gabriel, Luftwerk, Alexandra Noe and Edyta Stepien will work with Chefs Matthia Merges (Yusho) and Chris Pandel (Bristol and Balena) and Jared Van Camp (Element Collective). Score! WTT? freakin’ LOVES Yusho (can someone say double fried chicken and seafood too weird/ delicious to be located in Logan Square?). Looking at last year’s roundup, it’s unclear what is art and what’s food so hopefully we don’t see any tipsy art patrons trying to lick Luftwerk’s projections. Wait, who are we kidding? We TOTALLY hope that happens!

Tickets are available on the organization’s website. Chicago Artists Coalition is located at 217 N. Carpenter Street. See you there?

Reading is Fundamental

The Library is Open, Hunty

Conversation in Art Gallery Actually Has Tangible Result. As part of the Locust Projects Roundtable hosted by EXPO and Western Exhibitions, Chicago Artist Writers (CAW) wrote an on the spot review of Nicholas Gottlund exhibition at Paris London Hong Kong with Chicago’s king of conceptual art writing, Brandon Alvendia. Not for the anti-collaborative or the faint of heart.

The Aguilar Family Engages Openly. This 6-point perspective recap of the Aguilar Family’s experience at the Open Engagement conference last month in New York City is kind of like reading a Faulkner novel, except that it’s actually enjoyable. Short and sweet, take a minute to read both Part 1 and Park II on the Cultural Reproducers blog.

Become Required Reading! As artist Jason Lazarus once said on Facebook, “writing poetry is embarrassing and ecstatic.” Turns out it can also be profitable! Submit your writing to the Guild Literary Complex’s Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award and you can win $500 and the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve made more money off your writing than most poets.

Money can’t buy taste. Or can it? What is good taste anyway? Not the Yusho kind. “If art matters, then we should care about quality. And that means having the courage to forge a standard of good taste,” an article posted to the BBC boldly proclaims. We’re not ready to lead the charge but we enjoyed this meditation on taste for the BBC by Tiffany Jenkins anyway.

Chicago Celebrates Life of Frankie Knuckles With Totally Epic Dance Party

Gorgeous photo courtesy of Oscar Arriola

Don’t Snooze on These Upcoming Exhibitions…

Because clearly you will lose.

In the spirit of Stephanie Burke, here are our Top 3 most anticipated exhibitions opening in the next week.

Postcard image for Black Cauliflower.

Black Cauliflower. New work by Corkey Sinks & Jamie Steele opening June 14th, 6-9 PM and open through July 19th at Roots & Culture.

#BRUTEFORCEFIELD Work by Christopher Meerdo for his ACRE Exhibition, opening at The Hills Esthetic Center June 14th at 7PM. Open by appointment afterward.

Not sure what brutality has to do with puppies but we’re willing to find out.

Alex Chitty for Trunk Show. Opening Sunday, June 15th, from 2PM – 4PM on the rooftop Parking Lot at Home Depot, 1300 S Clinton St. (at Roosevelt). On view on the open road through Friday, July 18th. Follow @trunkshowtogo for updates on the gallery’s location.

The floor is covered with silver tarps and the entrance wall has the press release hand scrawled in acrylic paint. Partitions of white heavy plastic sheeting hanging from aluminum support beams create booths to mimic an art fair. This is Jose Lerma’s own art fair, where the works are made on site while you watch. For a full month during gallery hours, the artist and his assistants utilize MoCAD’s main exhibition space as an artist studio, transforming it into a one person art fair. Having opened May 16, the final display is this Friday, June 13, and will remain on display through July.

MoCAD’s announcement image for Jose Lerma La Bella Crisis

One of the strongest works on display is the monster made of U of M T-shirts and Spongebob’s idiotic face hanging from reflective curtains. Walking past the work lights blaring directly onto the curtains, the fabric reacts to create a fantastic sunset effect, albeit unapologetically cheesy. A few hanging junk assemblages are painted a uniform bright yellow to match Spongebob Square Sun. Two slabs of brick ruins from an old brownstone “play” a keyboard set to a shimmering new age setting. The bricks find their final resting place on the keys, and a non stop trance inducing drone fills the entire museum, aided by a small amplifier and the building’s open floor plan. The whole effect is theatrical and sublime, allowing the materials to transcend their position as trash or generic objects of ennui.

To the right is a horizontal stripe painting and a wooden cube reacting to a strobe light overhead. The colors become animated in the lights, dancing to the keyboard drone and a disco beat locked somewhere in the colors and released by the artist’s intervention. While this small section is playful, the strobe gets down to business in the next installation. In the west corner of the gallery, mirrors on both walls work their magic to turn a quarter circle of pastel painted bricks into a full circle. These surround a constructed podium adorned with triangles in every color and direction, ripped from a thrift store sweater (plus a background of Bird Shit White), housing plants and two tube TVs. The TVs play the same video: a few people in this very same environment making unintelligible sounds by flicking their cheeks incessantly, as if they are trying to create a language. The strobe is in the video as in the actual space, slowing down the video by de emphasizing certain frames within. This visual doubling and redoubling is complemented by the mic’d sound of the cheek recital. It too seems doubled and redoubled to the point of not even recognizing it as human: getting within earshot it sounds like a fountain. It takes watching the video and seeing yourself in the space to realize that it is not.

In a video made by MoCAD to promote the exhibition, Lerma speaks about the materials and the resulting work’s relationship to Detroit. He says: “I found a lot of these things on the street. And it’s shocking that they make a suitable replacement for artworks at an art fair; just junk that I found and you put together in a day.” Said so coyly, it seems like a dig, but I doubt to artists who work within the framework of detritus. Since he teaches at one of the nation’s largest art schools, he probably sees more than his fair share, and from all sides, of work that re-makes polemical modernist art, both from his peers and fellow faculty still engaged with it, and young students trying to address it in their smirkingly angry way. Go to Basel and see that shit is in some horse stalls across from the original LeWitts, Judds, etc., and you’re likely to think you can never escape it. So while the fake minimalist crap in the northwest part of the gallery looks really boring, there are a range of artworks at an art fair. Winners and losers. At Basel, its not just the works on display but the spectacle, the who’s who of both sides. The only thing that changes is the number of works still available for purchase. At MoCAD, the number of works keeps increasing, each hour and each day, creating more potentials of dialogues within the works in the exhibition.

While the museum claims Lerma is addressing the history of the building as a former auto dealership, the only real connection is through class markets. As the dealership no longer exists, the market is no longer the people who make the product. Underlining this is the idea of transient economies, like an art fair. Keep reading the press release and no one talks of sale, just dismantling. With support from Andrea Rosen and Kava Gupta Chicago/Berlin, the works will likely go on sale after the exhibition in other economies. The slimy part of art which is on full view at art fairs gets pushed almost entirely out of sight here. Standard procedure, sure, and several of these works deserve a good home. With the DIA just a couple blocks north of MoCAD, one can’t help but think of unspoken intentions when it comes to politicizing art speak. Since Lerma has never avoided history and politics in his work, I don’t doubt he sees this as another relationship his work creates with Detroit.

Beautiful cacophony, the secret rhythms of color exposed and a perfect blending of light, sound and materials. I can’t see him as this cynical, even though he is. Even at his most cynical, the resulting work is too beautiful to deny. Its like a predator perfectly stalking its prey, and that fragile creature who, in a moment of self absorption, or not being quick enough, or just dumb fucking luck — succumbs to the predator with such grace, that the whole event is nothing less than majestic. Everything that took place was exactly as it should, with nothing extra and no piece of carnage left out. The viewer is left staring, amazed. And as the drone seeps into your subconscious, the strobe lights screw with your sense of time and place, you start to understand the language created by the cheek recital.

José Lerma: La Bella Crisis is organized by MOCAD. It is curated by Elysia Borowy-Reeder, Executive Director of MOCAD and coordinated at MOCAD by Exhibitions Coordinator Zeb Smith. Exhibition runs from May 16 – July 27. For more information, visit MoCAD’s website here.

Over the coming months, the Bad at Sports blog is featuring quick glimpses of the art world as it exists in smaller cities across the country and around the world. Each glimpse is byway of some of the said city’s local characters, which include but are not limited to artists, curators, creative writers, and critics. In this Atlanta Day, Part 2 article, Bad at Sports correspondent Meredith Kooi has invited curator, performer, and arts administrator Priscilla Smith to examine some features of the city of Atlanta and its arts community: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Since I moved to Atlanta (this is Meredith talking) to start my PhD, I’ve been trying to make sense of this city. Usually, I use the space of my monthly writing for Bad at Sports as an opportunity to think with and through the art, performance, etc. that I witness and participate in here. Being from Chicago, ATL was foreign to me; I didn’t understand the ways in which it worked and all the complexities that determine it as the city it is. In this post, following Part I which examined “institutional legacy and memory,” Priscilla Smith takes on some of what might have lead Atlanta to where it is now and offers a few projects that maybe it, and we, should look to as examples of ways to keep working. Smith, a native to ATL, offers her perspective on this place, what it has to offer, and, maybe, what we could do without.

Now, Priscilla Smith:

Context: I got invited to give Bad at Sports my take on “the scene” in Atlanta. “What a Great Opportunity,” I thought. “It will be a Great Chance for Me to Reflect,” I thought. 1,000 words? No problem.

50% too long and six days after my self-imposed deadline, it’s still incomplete but I have to stop somewhere. Distilling my current experience as an art maker, producer, and participant in a city where I’ve spent my whole life is a bigger job than I’d imagined.

It’s only in the past three or four years that an Atlanta art patron has had to make a deliberate choice from a substantial selection of openings, lectures, plays, dance, music, immersive performance art (all of some respectable level of quality, ingenuity, or both) on a Thursday. It used to be that there would be a couple of visual art events a month, the Nutcracker, the Symphony, and two or three theaters with subscription seasons of “regional premieres.”

It had been a truism that, in order for an Atlanta artist or performer to “make it,” she’d have to leave Atlanta to fatten her resume, then come back to be be-laurel-ed: the Returning Art Hero. Nowadays, an artist can keep quite busy right here.

Not that all this activity is yielding a livable wage for artists. A recent and credible article pointed out that Atlanta has the greatest discrepancy between Haves and Have Nots in the country. I suspect that the money had by the Haves is being spent elsewhere. Our lovely High Museum, with its permanent collection, gallery of African Art, current visiting exhibitions, etc., could fit into Chicago’s Art Institute more than three times. Chicagoans spend money at home.

Instead, Atlantans spend money here on dining – fine, medium, and coarse. We spend money at our biggest-ass malls — where the truest cross-section of our populace can be found. These places are huge, busy, and had very low vacancy rates during the worst of the current recession.

In contrast, many private gallerists — largely a passionate, admirable group — allow that for days on end the only person walking through the door is working for FedEx. It isn’t the “death of the gallery” Jerry Saltz so eloquently eulogized, though. He visits 30 a week. We might have 30 altogether.

Non-profits like WonderRoot, with the mission of “Uniting Artists and Communities to Inspire Positive Social Change,” connect patrons and artists. WonderRoot established Atlanta’s first c.s.a. (consumer supported art) project, a rare example of successfully implementing another community’s good idea (see Fear of Originality below).

The scene in Atlanta is a fluctuating series of artwalks and public art extravaganzas, explosions of creativity and bitter disappointments.

Pretty much like anywhere else.

And, like anywhere else, people have opinions. Here are some of mine about our “cultural assets.”

The Beautiful:

1. Atlanta is a hilly town in a deep forest. We don’t have to make anything to live in a place of extraordinary gorgeousness.

2. Approaching Downtown on the abominable and divisive divided highways (Interstates were deliberately placed so as to perpetuate racial segregation), the traveler has the feeling of approaching a “real city” where buildings scrape the sky in a great variety of configurations from Beaux-Artes marble and a Neo-Classical gold dome to Phillip Johnson’s Po-Mo IBM erection.

3. We’ve got a city center with a street scene with actual people in it. After years of ghost-townishness, there’s hope.

6. Access – Artists of all forms can get their work before an audience; for example, a few significant spaces:

a. Whitespace –Generous genius Susan Bridges’ restored-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life Victorian mansion in the haute ‘hood Inman Park is a beacon for the stable-turned-ideal-gallery in the backyard showing an impressive variety of art and artists. Mind-bending performances often grace the patio and lawns and the low-ceilinged cellar, dubbed “Whitespec.”

b. Skwhirlhaus–Another act of generosity, the not-as-grand-but-equally-moving backyard venue founded by Maryn Whitmore “dedicated to providing a place where artists can challenge themselves artistically while striving to create an original, complete work.”

c. Art on the Atlanta BeltLine–“The largest temporary public art exhibition in the South” commissions work for the “largest urban redevelopment” project in the U.S. of A.

7. Growth–More galleries, more public art, more theaters, more artists, more dance, more environmental performances, more clubs, more original music, more, more, more

“Musicians” come from all over the world in search of a P.A., a Facebook post, and a dozen pairs of ears upon which to try their experiments and discoveries, from cranium-splitting amplification of metal-on-metal banging like Christian noise artist Scotty Irving (Clang Quartet) to the a-rhythmic acoustic plunkings of a guitar with each string tuned to G. Ugly like a Baroque pearl and twice as valuable.

2. The un-“official” Olympic Torch (provenance indeterminate; lots of people mistake it for the real thing) – a 3-story bird cage with a turd on top.

“official” Olympic torch.

“un-official” Olympic torch.

3. Atlanta’s own Triumphal “Millenium Gate,” just like the arch in Paris, only it’s made of fake stucco and was erected as a vanity project (wait, I guess Napoleon wasn’t exactly humble) to adorn a private town built on the sludge of a defunct steel mill within the city limits.

So Ugly It’s Depressing:

1. Fear of Originality –The Chamber of Commerce, the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, City Hall itself — all of these powerful entities look to what’s going on elsewhere and try to imitate others’ successful cultural forays without engaging the substantial resources of our own city. We pay consultants real money to tell us how better to run culture when spending money commissioning work here would go miles further.

2. Segregation –Aside from “the most segregated hour of the week” (church), the cultural life of Atlanta still struggles. However — While we’ve yet to develop audiences/patron groups that represent the full demographic profile of our cities or counties, things are changing. Every day. And addressing integration is a big reason why some of us stick around.

Ugly-in-Its-Absence:

Older Non-Monumental Architecture. Atlanta has historically and hysterically torn down anything it felt like in order to put up something new, even if the old thing was pretty and the new thing ugly. I remember as a young adolescent becoming aware of cool old buildings and spotting one out of the corner of my eye as we drove by. Three days later it was gone, making way for a pretty bland federal courthouse. The building I glimpsed was only about 50 years old, but it had towers.

Pretty-for-Its-Promise:

The good part is that someone pulled the string hanging above our heads, the light bulb lit up, and we’re tearing down less. Lo and behold, there’s an undiscovered cache of cool storefronts hiding under plastic signs and marquees in the underpopulated southern quarter of our re-bustling Downtown. Ebb and flow, pendulum swings . . .

The-Pain-in-the-Patooti:

Atlanta is a lot more like L.A. than New York. “Atlanta” often refers to a 13-county spread that can take four hours to traverse (or more) when traffic is bad–which is more and more of the time. As a result, there’s more interesting work being made and shown than anybody realizes. Just as the Major League Baseball team is headed to the suburbs, the ballet, the opera, theater companies, galleries, artists, and clubs speckle the map.

Salve for the Pain:

The city proper “Inside the Perimeter” (or ITP in local shorthand) has a growing population after horrible years of exurban migration.

2. Living Walls The City Speaksurban conference and mural-a-thon — now an annual event; some excellent and some awful big outdoor wall paintings done by artists from all over the globe, gallery shows of their work, a real change in public and institutional perceptions.

3. Beep Beep Gallery Owners’ success lead them to open a hugely popular bar “Mother.”

4. SUMPTUARY –A month-long series of installations and performances where refreshment sales generated income for presenting artists. It was Where It’s At when it was on.

Priscilla Smith became the executive director of Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery as a volunteer in 2009, and in November 2013, became Eyedrum’s first paid employee when she started drawing a salary. She has created and presented performance art works, solo and in collaboration, in the streets and galleries of Atlanta since the early 1980s. Her first public art intervention took place in 1986 when she performed “I’m Sorry,” in which she fabricated a deconstructed hoop skirt and apologized to passersby during the Atlanta “Tight Squeeze Festival.” Most recently she distributed envelopes of money to passersby in the guise of “Lovey Joy” for her ongoing project “What I Did With The Money” as a commission for Flux Projects. In 2013 she played Clara 2 in Oh! Fearsome Head!, part III at The Big Haus. Other recent appearances include her original work “87 Gestures” for Dance Chance Atlanta and as a curtain-raiser for Oh! Fearsome! Head!, part II. She was a founding company member of ACME Theater that from 1980 to 1990 presented original performance works ranging from improvisational contemporary opera to full-length original dramas. She created a closing performance event for the centennial symposium in observance of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, has collaborated with Beacon Dance and John Q, and directed and produced over 35 evenings of student-created dramatic works at Horizons School and The Atlanta School in 21 years as an educator. She has served as performance coordinator for Art on the Atlanta BeltLine and was co-producer and co-founder of the 2010 Living Walls Conference. She holds a B.A. in speech and drama from Trinity University.

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